One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn't recognize calls out to him. To Kelly’s shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, who was one of Kelly’s closest friends in high school—and, before his disappearance nearly twenty years before, skinny, white, and Jewish. Martin then tells an astonishing story: After years of immersing himself in black culture, he’s had a plastic surgeon perform “racial reassignment surgery”—altering his hair, skin, and physiognomy to allow him to pass as African American. Unknown to his family or childhood friends, Martin has been living a new life ever since.Now, however, Martin feels he can no longer keep his new identity a secret; he wants Kelly to help him ignite a controversy that will help sell racial reassignment surgery to the world. Kelly, still recovering from the death of his wife and child and looking for a way to begin anew, agrees, and things quickly begin to spiral out of control.
Inventive and thought-provoking, Your Face in Mine is a brilliant novel about cultural and racial alienation and the nature of belonging in a world where identity can be a stigma or a lucrative brand.
372 pages (August 2014)
Book Page at BookBrowse.
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's
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Story Hour in the Library featuring Jess Row (UC Berkeley Events):
Jess Row reads from Your Face in Mine (West Hartford Public Library):
Author Interview at npr:
This title is available for download as an eBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.
Title Read-alikes: Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett; I Am Radar by Reif Larsen; In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende; Open City by Teju Cole; A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara; We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin; Home by Toni Morrison; The Mothers by Brit Bennett; The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow; A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley; The Black Witch by Laurie Forest; And Again by Jessica Chiarella; and An Untamed State by Roxane Gay.
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